Bill Curry (yes, yes, I know) was next to me, yakking about the latest gubernatorial debate, and the woman in front of us in line whirled around and, demonstrably angry, said she has voted in every election since 1822 or something and that is THE ONLY reason she is voting in this one: Because she refuses to let these two monkey heads, these two sacks of poop, snap her unbroken voting streak. (I'm pretty sure she meant Tom Foley and Dan Malloy, not me and Curry.)

She was bouncing up and down, she was so agitated about what a miserable choice this election represents. I got the feeling she might vote for third party candidate Visconti. She even called him just "Joe."

This helps explain why "Joe" enjoyed the support of 16 percent of unaffiliated voters in the latest Quinnipiac poll. Normally, in Connecticut, that would spell instant death for a Republican challenger. There so few Republicans that huge waves of support from unaffiliated voters is essential.

But Connecticut is still a dead heat. Why? Partly because 11 percent of Democrats say they are voting for Foley. This is also very unusual.

This is not a normal race. One candidate is going to drive the state into a ditch. The other one is doing to drive it off a cliff. The third guy isn't going to get elected, which makes it very tempting to vote for him.

That points toward low turnout. The woman in the ticket line is an anomaly. She has a Cal Ripken voting streak on the line. She would probably vote if the candidates were two large snakes with slightly different markings.

There's no presidential or U.S. Senate race. Four of the five congressional races are landslides. The underticket races are cakewalks. There's almost no reason to venture out to the polls. People are starting to lose interest.

Unfortunately, one of those people may be Tom Foley.

I have been using Foley as an object lesson to my son, who often mentions his desire to be obscenely rich. I always tell him that insane wealth is not guarantee of happiness. I mean this from the bottom of my parental heart, even though I would very much like to win Powerball and buy an apartment in Paris near the Place des Vosges.

You can own — as Foley does — a 125-foot-yacht whose name refers to a female slave or concubine. You can have a vintage British fighter jet and bunch of vintage motorcycles. And you can be still be so bored that you will volunteer for an arduous process that obliges you to go to the Windsor Chilifest, the Riverton Fair and a Danbury hot dog joint in one day and essentially repeat that process with slightly different versions of acid reflux, day after day.

It's what Gatsby faced at the end of another fabulous party: "A sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great doors …"

It's great that Foley decided to seek something more meaningful than cruising the waters of the Mediterranean one more time, standing at the helm of the Odalisque next to some South African guy he hired to captain the thing.

But I worry that the sudden emptiness that drove him into the race is now chasing him around Connecticut.

On Wednesday, he loped lazily through an appearance at a housing forum, unencumbered by actual information about housing. He didn't know what "supportive housing" referred to. He told the forum that, once the economy started moving again "a lot of these problems take care of themselves." Some version of this is a frequent refrain in Foley's answers, which would be fine if anybody could remember a problem taking care of itself in the last 25 years.

The same day on WNPR, pressed about a business he bought that outsourced some jobs to Mexico, Foley finally rejoined, "I owned it, but I didn't run it."

Oh dear.

This is my fear. That running Connecticut is not so much Foley's passion as one possible alternative to a thinning Firenze briefcase of enthusiasms. Tom, do not tire of us before you have us.

Editor's note: The date of the housing forum was corrected from an earlier version of this piece.

Colin McEnroe appears from 1 to 2 p.m. weekdays on WNPR-FM (90.5) and blogs at courantblogs.com/colin-mcenroe. He can be reached at Colin@wnpr.org.